Bolton said on “Fox & Friends” that the operation could have been carried out by China, Iran or North Korea, and he denied he meant to imply that the Obama administration may have been involved.”Typical bad reporting,” Bolton said.

John Bolton told Fox News on Sunday that the hacks may not have been carried out by Russia, as the intelligence community believes, but implied the Obama administration itself could’ve been secretly responsible.

“It is not at all clear to me just viewing this from the outside, that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation,” Bolton told reporter Eric Shawn.

“False flag” is a term that refers to covert activities undertaken by a government or other entity to advance its own political agenda by making it look as if someone else did it.

“A really sophisticated foreign intelligence service would not leave any cyber fingerprints,” he said. “So the question that has to be asked is why did the Russians run their smart intelligence service against Hillary [Clinton]’s server, but their dumb intelligence services against the election?”